'I think he is rather loony, Father. He spat at me twice.'

'He spat at you?'

George thinks again. He is still frightened, but knows this is no reason to tell less than the truth.

'I cannot be certain of that, Father. He was about a yard away, and he spat twice very close to my foot. It's possible he was spitting just like rough people do. But when he did it he seemed to be cross with me.'

'Do you think that is sufficient proof of intention?' George likes this. He is being treated as a future solicitor. 'Perhaps not, Father.'

'I agree with you. Good. I shall not mention the spitting.' Three days later the Reverend Shapurji Edalji receives a reply from Captain the Honourable George A. Anson, Chief Constable of Staffordshire. It is dated January 23rd 1893, and does not contain the expected apology and promise of action. Instead, Anson writes:

Will you please ask your son George from whom the key was obtained which was laid on your doorstep on Dec. 12? The key was stolen, but if it can be shown that the whole thing was due to some idle freak or practical joke, I should not be inclined to allow any police proceedings to be taken in regard to it. If, however, the persons concerned in the removal of the key refuse to make any explanation of the subject, I must necessarily treat the matter in all seriousness as a theft. I may say at once that I shall not pretend to believe any protestations of ignorance which your son may make about this key. My information on the subject does not come from the police.

The Vicar knows his son to be a decent and honourable boy. He must overcome the nerves he seems to have inherited from his mother, but is already showing much promise. The time has come to begin treating him as an adult. He shows George the letter and asks for his view.

George reads the letter twice and takes a moment to assemble his thoughts.

'In the lane,' he begins slowly, 'Sergeant Upton accused me of going to Walsall School and stealing the key. The Chief Constable, on the other hand, accuses me of being in alliance with someone else, or several others. One of them took the key, then I accepted the stolen item and put it on the step. Perhaps they realize I have not been in Walsall for two years. At any event, they have changed their story.'

'Yes. Good. I agree. And what else do you think?

'I think they must both be loony.'

'George, that's a childish word. And in any case it is our Christian duty to pity and cherish the feeble of mind.'

'I'm sorry, Father. Then all I can think is that they… that they must suspect me for some reason I do not understand.'

'And what do you think he means when he writes "My information on the subject does not come from the police"?'

'He must mean that someone has sent him a letter denouncing me. Unless… unless he is not telling the truth. He might be pretending to know things he doesn't. Perhaps it is just a bluff.'

Shapurji smiles at his son. 'George, with your eyesight you would never have made a detective. But with your brain you will be a very fine solicitor.'

Arthur and Louisa did not get married in Southsea. Nor did they get married in Minsterworth, Gloucestershire, the bride's parish of origin. Nor did they get married in the city of Arthur 's birth.

When Arthur quit Edinburgh as a newly qualified doctor, he left behind the Mam, his brother Innes, and his three youngest sisters – Connie, Ida and little Julia. He also left behind the flat's other occupant, Dr Bryan Waller, supposed poet, incontrovertible lodger, and a fellow too damned at ease with the world. Despite all Arthur's gratitude for Waller's tutorial help, something still rankled. He could never quite allay his suspicion that the lodger's assistance had not been disinterested; though where exactly that interest might lie Arthur was unable to detect.

When he left, Arthur had imagined that Waller would soon set up his own Edinburgh practice, would acquire a wife and a little local reputation, and then fade into the status of an occasional memory. Such expectations were not to be fulfilled. Arthur went out into the world to forage on behalf of his unprotected family, only to find that Waller had taken on the task of protection himself, which was none of his damned business. He had become, in a phrase Arthur deliberately avoided using in letters to the Mam, a cuckoo in the nest. Each time Arthur came home, he found himself credulously imagining that the family narrative, suspended since his last visit, would resume where it had left off. But each time he was made aware that the story – his favourite story -had moved on without him. He found himself catching at words, at unexpected glances and allusions, at anecdotes in which he no longer featured. There was a life going on here without him, and that life seemed to be animated by the lodger.

Bryan Waller did not set up as a doctor; nor did his poetry-scribbling turn into a professional habit. He inherited an estate at Ingleton in the West Riding of Yorkshire and settled for the idle life of an English squire. The cuckoo now had twenty-four acres of his own woodland surrounding a grey stone nest called Masongill House. Well then, so much the better. Except that Arthur had scarcely absorbed this good news when a letter arrived from the Mam, informing him that she, Ida and Dodo were also leaving Edinburgh; also for Masongill, where a cottage on the estate was being prepared for them. The Mam did not attempt a justification – the healthy air, an unhealthy child, perhaps – merely stated that this was happening. Indeed, had already happened. Oh yes, here was a justification: the rent was very low.

Arthur felt it as a kidnapping and betrayal combined. He entirely failed to persuade himself that this was a chivalrous action on Waller's part. A true courtly knight would have arranged for some mysterious inheritance to come the way of the Mam and her daughters, while himself departing to a distant land on a long and preferably perilous quest. A true courtly knight would also not have jilted Lottie or Connie, whichever of the two it had been. Arthur had no proof, and perhaps it had been no more than a flirting which induced false expectations, but something had been going on, if certain hints and female silences meant what he guessed.

Arthur's suspicions did not, alas, end there. He was a young man who liked things clear and certain, yet found himself in a place where little was clear and some certainties were unacceptable. That Waller was more than just a lodger was as plain as the nose on your face. He was often referred to as a friend of the family, even one of the family. Not so by Arthur: he did not want an elder brother suddenly thrust upon him, let alone a sibling at whom the Mam smiled in a different way. Waller was six years older than Arthur, and fifteen years younger than the Mam. Arthur would have thrust his hand into fire in defence of his mother's honour; his principles, and his sense of family, and the duty owed to it, had all come from her. And yet, he sometimes found himself wondering, how would things appear in a police court? What evidence might be given, and what assumptions made by a jury? Consider, for instance, this item: his father was an enfeebled dipsomaniac occasionally confined to nursing homes, his mother had borne her final child while Bryan Waller was part of the household, and she had given that daughter four Christian names. The last three of these were Mary, Julia and Josephine; the child's nickname was Dodo. But her first given name was Bryan. Apart from anything else, Arthur did not agree that Bryan was a girl's name.

While Arthur was courting Louisa, his father managed to obtain alcohol in his nursing home, broke a window trying to escape and was transferred to the Montrose Royal Lunatic Asylum. On the 6th of August 1885 Arthur and Touie were married at St Oswald's, Thornton-in-Lonsdale, in the county of Yorkshire. The groom was twenty-six, the bride twenty-eight. Arthur's best man was not a fellow member of the Southsea Bowling Club, of the Portsmouth Literary and Scientific Society, or of Phoenix Lodge No. 257. The Mam had made all the arrangements, and Arthur's best man was Bryan Waller, who seemed to have taken over as future provider of velvet dresses, gold glasses, and comfortable seats by the fire.